There are two main forms of fatty liver disease:
Alcoholic Liver Disease: this results from heavy drinking and causes accumulation of fat in the liver. Moderate drinking is defined as one drink a day for women and up to two drinks per day for men. About 5% of people in the U.S. have this form of liver disease.
Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) occurs in people who aren’t heavy drinkers or who may not even drink at all. This condition affects 1 in 3 adults and 1 in 10 children in the U.S. So many of the patients I see have this form of fatty liver — and many of them are vegetarian, eat freshly made homemade food at home, and never drink alcohol or eat junk food. How could this be? Something is obviously scarring their liver. We’ll talk about it in a minute.
High levels of liver enzymes which turn up on blood work are a sign your liver is injured. To definitively diagnosis fatty liver disease your doctor might order an ultrasound or a CT scan of the liver or a liver biopsy to determine how far the liver disease has progressed.
In most cases fatty liver disease doesn’t cause any serious problems or prevent your liver from functioning properly, but 7 to 30% of people with fatty liver disease get worse over time. It can progress through 3 stages:
In the first stage the liver becomes inflamed and swollen which damages its tissue.
In the second stage scar tissue forms where your liver is damaged. This process is called fibrosis.
By the third stage, extensive scar tissue replaces the healthy tissue causing cirrhosis of the liver. This hard scar tissue that replaces healthy liver tissue slows down the liver’s functioning and can eventually block the liver functions entirely. Cirrhosis can lead to liver failure and liver cancer.
Obesity, metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes increase the risk of developing NAFLD, but by far, the most common cause is the the consumption of vegetable oils containing omega-6 fatty acids. This was what I see everyday in my busy Ayurvedic practice.
Early on I used to wonder how this could be: I had hundreds of patients present with fatty liver, yet when I asked them if they had ever drank alcohol the reply was “no, never.” Then when I asked them what they ate, it was usually a very healthy diet, cooking homemade food from scratch every day, with no processed foods. I remember in those early years trying to figure out what had tortured their liver. Many of the Americans were taking lots of synthetic nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals and processed foods, so I attributed their fatty liver to years of neglect, as the liver had to process all these harsh foods and chemicals. But the people I saw from India weren’t taking vitamins, and never took the high doses of birth control pills, antibiotics and other medications the Americans take which over time disrupt their liver function. It was an enigma. I used to lie in bed at night wondering how hundreds and thousands of my Indian patients had fatty liver when there was no obvious reason for their liver damage.
Then it finally occurred to me. I realized I had never asked them what type of cooking oils they were using. When I did it became obvious how the damage had occurred. They were all using processed vegetable oils. They all reported to me that they consumed mustard oil, ground nut oil (peanut oil), Canola and other vegetable oil blends on a regular basis. It turns out that when you heat these oils compounds are formed which cause severe liver damage in a very short period of time, even by the time the person is a teenager. Let’s take a look more deeply at this very important issue, because this very same thing is happening to people all around the world, and it causes not only a fatty liver, but also plaque buildup in the arteries as these oils also form a plastic which clogs the arteries once they are heated.
The term vegetable oil is used to refer to any oil that comes from plant sources. Vegetable oils include, but are not limited to the following: corn, soybean, Canola, sunflower, peanut, cottonseed, palm, mustard, and safflower oils. These oils are referred to as industrial oils. They require the use of chemical solvents such as hexane to extract the oil from the seed. The oils are then hydrogenated at high temperatures and are then deodorized. Processed oils have been pushed past their heat tolerance and have become rancid during their processing.
These oils are rich in Omega-6 polyunsaturated acids. While we may need a small amount of omega-6’s in our diet the best range of omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is 2:1 or even better 1:1. The modern diet has dramatically shirted this ratio up to 15 to:1 and even up to 50:1.
When you heat these dangerous oils they form a poison, and since everything you swallow has to be processed by the liver, they end up damaging it over time, causing this huge epidemic of fatty liver disease we are seeing in most of the industrialized world.
Also, as a side note: avoid flaxseed oil: it contains too much inherent heat, which is especially harsh to both the liver and the spleen. So you must carefully choose the type of oil you use for cooking. Yes, it may be much more expensive than the cheap industrial highly processed oils, but your health is worth it.
Here are some other reasons for a fatty liver, but again, by far, from what I can see in my patients, the use of the cheap vegetable oils accounts for a large percentage of the fatty liver disease:
Avoid white refined table sugar and agave, both of which are poisonous to the liver. Too much refined sugar and fructose corn syrup causes a fatty buildup in the liver and in fact some studies show that sugar can be just as damaging to the liver as alcohol. Eat the more natural forms of sugar such as jaggery, coconut sugar, maple syrup, succanat, evaporated cane juice and raw honey.
Some people take kava kava, an herb for symptoms of menopause or to help them relax. But studies show that it can keep the liver from functioning correctly and can lead to hepatitis and liver failure. Some countries have restricted its use or banned it altogether, but it is still available in the U.S.
Avoid high doses of Vitamin A supplements as they can disturb the liver function. It’s best to get this vitamin through fresh fruit and vegetables, especially those that are red, orange or yellow in color.
Acetaminophen used for pain, headaches, cold symptoms and insomnia can cause a lot of liver damage if taken at too high a dose or for too long. I once had a patient who took the recommended dose of acetaminophen every night for years to help her sleep, but even at the normal dose it damaged her liver to the point where she needed a liver transplant.
Please be careful of your intake of alcohol because it can definitely cause a fatty liver even if you’re not an alcoholic or addicted to alcohol since it is extremely damaging to the liver.
No medicines have been approved to treat fatty liver disease since, by nature, all pharmaceuticals are toxic to the liver.
This is where Ayurveda comes in. We have numerous treatments to quickly and effectively reverse fatty liver disease, including diet, daily routine, cleansing techniques and herbs to heal the liver.
First and foremost, include organic extra-virgin cold-pressed pure olive oil in your diet. Keep in mind that most of the olive oils found in the local supermarkets are processed with heat and chemicals and have lots of vegetable oils blended into them, making them just as dangerous as the plain vegetable oils just mentioned. Many people think they are eating a heart-healthy oil when they buy these cheap olive oils on the market. Search out the pure, more expensive cold pressed, extra virgin olive oils loaded with polyphenols to keep your liver as healthy as you can.
The ancient doctors of India said that ghee was easier to digest than any oil. Make sure the ghee you get is from grass-fed cows as they make lots of omega-3’s when they eat grass. Most of the cows in the United States are fed grains, so their milk and butter will contain very high levels of omega-6’s as a result, which causes lots of fatty liver disease, as well as cancer and diabetes. So if you make ghee, make sure the butter you’re using is from grass-fed cows.
Keep your liver happy by consuming only olive oil and ghee. Olive oil, avocado oil and coconut oil are considered fruit oils, and while it is true that they are not classified as vegetable oils, and are therefore more healthy, we still do not recommend the widespread use of avocado and coconut oils as they are very heavy, cold and difficult to digest. Just stick with the olive oil to be on the safe side.
Bitter melon, also known as bitter gourd or karela is very good for healing the liver. Its bitter taste helps to pull toxins from the liver. The liver actually heats up when it is holding onto a lot of toxins, so we teach our patients how to cook with lauki squash, which is the most cooling food for the liver. Yellow squash and green zucchini are a good second choice. We also use various liver clay packs and transdermal creams made with deglychrryzed licorice to cool a heated liver.
Cooked beets, artichokes, moringa leaves and the drumstick from the moringa tree are also excellent for detoxifying the liver.
Turmeric is considered the best friend to the liver as it helps it to detoxify, but it quickly becomes its enemy if you take capsules of it, or even worse, curcumin, which is the active ingredient in the turmeric. Both will overly heat the liver, and upset its function. Just cook with turmeric in the diet. It is easiest to assimilate it if you cook it into a fat, such as boiled milk or sautéed in ghee or olive oil. Don’t cook with the fresh root of the turmeric, as it is also too heating to the liver. And be careful of the turmeric sold in some Indian markets as it could be a white powder with a yellow dye sprayed onto it.
Ayurveda has lots of herbs for the liver which can both clean it and cool it down. This is an important issue, because there are many herbs, found in both Ayurveda and other systems of healing which clean the liver, but most heat the liver as they do this. Especially milk thistle, which, while it may have lots of benefit to the liver it also heats it up tremendously in the process of healing it, which can backfire on you in this modern age when the liver is so hot and distressed by many of the thousands of chemicals we have allowed into our environment, all of which are heating.
So we must pull from our vast array of cleansing liver herbs only those which keep the liver cool as they clean it.
And the best news of all is that we actually have herbs which can regenerate the liver cells once they have been damaged. That’s the good news about the liver — it is quite good at regenerating, you just have to know how to do it.
Which is why we have an excellent track record of treating fatty liver disease, especially if it is detected in its early stages before it has progressed to severe cirrhosis of the liver.
Please learn how to take good care of the liver as the ancient Ayurvedic doctors considered it the most important organ in the body since it has over 500 functions, the most important of which is that it keeps the blood clean for optimum brain function.
As I just mentioned, the liver is very good at rejuvenating itself, unlike some of the other organs in the body, and you can usually reverse a fatty liver if you put into action many of the methods I have mentioned here. By following these guidelines you can live an extremely healthy life if you keep your liver in good shape, as almost every disease process you can think of begins with weak liver function.
Thank you.